Okay, I'm boldly -- or at least semi-boldly -- venturing out into the
world of Linux after being a pure Win3.1/9x/XP user for many years.
I've hunted around enough to pick up some of the lingo, but that's
about the extent of my knowledge. My experiance with non-Wintel
machines is decades in the past (Apple ][, Amiga 500)
I've recently converted my old Win98 box, a 500MHz P-III, to Linux
using the Fedora Core 3 distro included with "Linux For Dummies".
Yes, I know Core 3 is a little older as distros go, (a little?!
'current' is what, Core 6?) but it seems to be working out so far, a
good fit with the hardware I'm using it on.
My goals for this machine is to set it up as a personal desktop,
(admittedly, secondary to my XP box, at least until they stop
supporting XP :P and/or I learn Linux), with the basic games and stuff
included with the distro. As long as I can websurf with it, and do
some number-crunching for [EMAIL PROTECTED], I'll be perfectly happy with it.
>From a hardware standpoint, I'm quite pleased; everything was
recognized and worked "right out of the box", including my
motherboard's USB ports. I'd tried another distro on that P-III
first, called "EasyLinux", which was IIRC some sort of Red Hat
derivation...I could never figure out what Core-kernel-etc. it was,
which made updating anything and figuring dependencies a
way-too-technical-for-my-skill-level process. EasyLinux also didn't
recognize the USB ports...and correcting that also looked waaaay to
technical for right now.
So, anyway, this "for Dummies" distro has some sort of autoupdate
capability built into it. That's great, except it seems to be
hanging, when it doesn't get a 404 from the ftp!
I *think* I'm using the Gnome desktop -- whatever comes up by default.
The real question, now that I've laid out all this background,
involves updating existing software. Let's say I get tired of waiting
for this autoupdate to actually work, and want to update Firefox
manually? The distro included a 0.xx pre-release version!
So, by virtue of the poking around I've done so far, I know I can d/l
the tarball from Mozilla, plop it down just about anywhere in the
filesystem (say, in my non-root Home directory), untar it, and execute
it from there. But that leaves me with the OLD (untouched) version
being referenced by the Application menu in the desktop toolbar, and I
have no idea how to change that association.
I d/l'ed the generic Linux version of Firefox 2 because I couldn't
(immediately or easily) find an rpm for Core 3, which might have made
life easier for me; googling got me nowhere. I'd appreciate it if
someone could point me to a site, or at least suggest more effective
search keywords!
I'm also hoping to find an RPM for BOINC Manager, so I can get the
[EMAIL PROTECTED] thing going as well.
I'm hoping to do as much of this as possible from the GUI; while I'm
sophisticated enough to follow technical command-line procedures, I'd
rather not unless absolutely necessary. Just getting lazy in my
advancing age, I guess ;).
Also, none of the articles or manuals I've read have quite gotten me
to understand just what the 'ln' command is supposed to do...and it
tends to figure prominently in manual install procedures!
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